Monet & Architecture at the National Gallery, London
MONET AND ARCHITECTURE
AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON
ON THE 14TH OF JUNE 2018
Claude
Monet, born in Paris, but brought up in provincial Normandy, rejected the
conventional art school progression for painting en plein air (in the open air).
His subsequent journey across Europe, limited by modes and means,
encompassed various cities, centres of culture, that had already been
criss-crossed, absorbed or rejected by countless other artists, writers and
travellers. Monet, however, was to be at
the centre of an art movement, Impressionism, that changed the world. Its centre was to be found in France at a
time of great ferment following the cataclysmic defeat of 1870 in the
Franco-Prussian war.
Monet
derived his engagement with landscape from English art which had turned to this
genre because of Romanticism, its dichotomization of culture and nature, its
nature worship, and because of a patriotic upsurge following the end of the
period of upheaval initiated by the French revolution in 1789. Monet chose a cosmopolitan route through
Holland, Britain and Italy while dallying in his native Rouen in 1894 to depict
its Norman cathedral.
Initially
Monet began journeying through Holland and its capital Amsterdam. The lofty homes of burghers and the light
effects offered by surrounding waterways, were Monet’s subjects, he carefully
balances out pictorial and topical elements.
His early work seems trite, conventional, except for works like The Church at Vetheuil (1878) where
volume, perspective and other pictorial elements seem to collide, offering the
impression that the buildings are crashing in upon each other. Otherwise Monet depicts cliched scenes of
Holland, windmills, canals, cobbled streets, women wearing clogs and carrying
tulips, that were designed to attract buyers.
His
time in Holland coincided with the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War, an
alternate explanation of Monet’s peripatetic pursuit of art and seemingly
futile wandering. France was now in a
state of political and economic crisis and soon Monet was to join the Emperor
Louis Napoleon in exile in London. Monet
was a draft dodger, interested in commercial possibilities offered by London’s
art market, probably realising that France would soon be tearing itself apart
because of the fall of the Second Empire.
He would have been unpopular among patriotic supporters of the Emperor,
if, indeed, there were any left. After
the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 France was to become a Republic again and
Monet was to return to his homeland.
By
the 1880s Monet had returned to France and was exploring the possibilities
offered by his own province of Normandy, he was attempting to re-connect with
his region after an émigré existence.
The buildings he painted such as the 16th century church of
Saint-Valery, a tiny customs officer’s cottage and modern holiday villas near
Dieppe. These buildings are isolated in
contrast to his work in Holland as if they are a substitute for the human
presence. In works like The Church at Varengeville, Morning Effect
(1882) and The Church at Varengeville and
the Gorge of Moutiers Pass (1882) vast cliffs, representing indifferent,
monumental nature, form a context for modern and antique buildings. Modelling, lighting and form allow for
figurative contrasts which contrastively underline the ephemeral nature of the
human. The compositions are now
thoughtful and a message about buildings, their connection to the landscape, is
being hammered out.
With
the spread of railways throughout Europe and the arrival of readily available
tourist guidebooks, Monet was now able to travel along the Mediterranean coast
in 1884. As a northern European Monet
sought the intense light that had been the inspiration for so many generations
of Italian artists. He was drawn to
places such as Dolceacqua and Bordighera, just across the border in northern
Italy. Four years later he would return
to paint the city of Antibes. Monet
surrounds the town of Bordighera with sumptuous flora, including the ubiquitous
palms as in View of Bordighera (1884)
and Villas at Bordighera (1884). Towards the end of this period the death of
one of the founders of Impressionism, Alfred Sisley in 1899 and his
stepdaughter in the same year, led Monet to re-evaluate his own past by
creating symmetrical compositions such as The
Water-Lily Pond (1899) that seem to insist on a harmonised vision at a time
of deep despair. At this time, he also
revisited his first wife’s grave and his old home.
Monet
was clearly interested in creating cityscapes especially following the impact
of The Exposition Universelle in 1867, an international World Fair held in
Paris. However, Monet’s financial
situation would mean that he sought homes in the countryside and suburbs and
would only occasionally now explore bigger centres like Paris, London and
Venice. In 1871 he settled in
Argenteuil, a suburb 15 km north west of central Paris. He would live in Argenteuil for six years,
recording its reconstruction after the war when it suffered damage and its
expanding population which had almost doubled in the two decades before Monet’s
arrival. In 53 Monet records a national
holiday where great Republican fervour is on display which also reflects the
artist’s own views of spontaneous patriotism following the implosion of the
Second Empire. Other works depict
Argenteuil’s reconstruction, for instance, Argenteuil,
the Bridge under Repair (1872) and The
Wooden Bridge, Argenteuil (1872) and, as in Sailing Boat at Petit-Gennevilliers (1874), photographic effects
where a man-made horizon line is placed above the natural one. Monet is constantly seeking to establish
links between the city and distant suburb which was, indeed, connected by a
railway which terminated at the Gare Saint Lazare in central Paris.
By
the time Monet returned to London in 1899 his Impressionist technique had been
established but the artist was now reaching beyond Impressionism towards
abstraction and abstract Expressionism as in Charing Cross Bridge, the Thames (about 1899-1903) and San Giorgio Maggiore (1908). He was now painting in series to register the
influence on landscape of effets,
shifting light, clouds that imply a shimmering, transitory and spectral
world. He had learned about painting in
series from Japanese artists like Hokusai and his 35 Views of Mount Fuji and had begun to incorporate Japanese forms
and genres into his work. Five
succeeding trips to London between 1899 and 1904 resulted in over 100
canvases. Monet would re-work the
pictures on returning to his Giverny studio.
Another
subject was Rouen’s cathedral which extended Monet’s understanding of effet, the influence of cloud cover,
transitions of lighting that establish moods and contrasts.
Finally,
Monet arrived in Venice in 1908 with his second wife, Alice. He had been invited by Mrs Mary Hunter who he
had met in London. The influence of
Turner is palpable but many complicated associations crowd in to these, by
turns, sombre, austere, radiant, lustrous works. There is the intimation of a world, or a
world-view, that is ending, the canals of Venice a cul de sac terminating with
1914 and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. Its possible to compare the paintings with
Visconti’s film of Thomas Mann’s novella Death
in Venice (published on the eve of the Great War in 1913) but they do not offer
the final postscript since Monet kept painting at Giverny until 1926. He was now a widower, his eyesight was
failing, his radical eye was confined to his lily ponds and gardens.
Paul Murphy, National
Gallery, June 2018
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